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from the windows-osx-tarpit-forever-and-ever dept.
South Korea's government explores move from Windows to Linux desktop
With Windows 7 in its support coffin, some institutions are finally giving up on Windows entirely. The biggest of these may be the South Korean government. In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux.
[...] The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."
How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
[...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro.
Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model.
Another reason might be if you don't trust the government of Windows' country of origin.
There have been stories of big moves from Windows to Linux for years. Do any Soylentils know of Linux deployments replacing Windows that have occurred and still remain in effect?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:05PM
Former megacorporation moved all of field circus to ipads which are functionally identical in use to android running on linux tablets. Ditto my kids school not just students but staff, plus some chromebooks.
I would say even at the megacorporation, by mid 2010s every "application" for almost all drones had a web interface so even PC rollouts amounted to "install chrome on bare metal" and little to nothing else. Almost no apps run on windows anymore, they run on a web browser that might be on a virus and security infection prone windows os.
You can even run pretty advanced CAD in a browser, see "onshape", although my former employer has not used that ... yet ... AFAIK. Meanwhile my development laptop had specs beyond anything anyone can buy in a laptop because its rdesktop over a VPN into a VMWare cluster with a beefy "testing" image. The fan never turns on and the battery lasts forever and with stuff like Apache Guacamole, the rdesktop connection works fine from a chromebook too. So for places that have one or two legacy windows apps, just rdesktop (or similar) into an image.